We have remarked previously upon the dubiousness of academic ‘consensus’. The position of a majority does not make fact of non-fact nor sense of nonsense.
Perhaps nowhere is the principle of ‘consensus’ more ensconced than in the domain of science. Despite appeals to ‘empiricism’, the aforementioned dubiousness remains just the same, and is actually quite visible: consensus in one century—or even one generation—is always being overhauled or supplanted by consensus in the next. And scientists are by no means immune from the fallacy of argumentum ad populum.
But there is cause for skepticism even when it comes to bona fide science, as scientists do not enjoy any special immunity from metaphysical presuppositions either. How data is read is colored by prescientific assumptions. Empirical data is one thing, whereas the interpretation of that data is something else.
Even Stephen Hawking admitted that things like cosmological models necessarily contain “some admixture of ideology.” Granted, this statement may have originated from his far more reasonable Large Scale Structure of Space-Time co-author, George Ellis, who has often discussed the unavoidability of philosophical predispositions.
Far more sobering is Wolfgang Smith’s bare bones explanation concerning data collected in the detection of stars, galaxies, and other stellar objects. Although there are a handful of inferences from empirical data which we may take as certitudes, for the most part
all that we have to go on is light emitted by the objects in question and received through telescopes, be they terrestrial or mounted on satellites. By light, moreover, I mean electromagnetic radiation of whatever frequency, from radio waves down through the visible range to X-rays and gamma rays. In a word, what we have are light-particles or photons, each of which defines a position on a photographic plate and carries a frequency: that is all. These are, if you will, the actual empirical facts; the rest is theory, a matter of interpretation. (Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology 133)
In sum, we have two principles to heed:
What we take as true should be determined on the basis of reasoning as opposed to majoritarianism. Truth is not a democracy.
The truth or falsehood of the scientist’s metaphysical presuppositions—the lenses through which he reads empirical data—cannot be discerned on scientific grounds. “Admixtures of ideology” must be thoroughly sifted, and this can only be done on philosophical grounds.